"We can't allow things that are inaccurate to stand." — The Word of Our Dan, February 19, 2008.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

"Have" municipalities

There is all kinds of Fascinating to be found in Wade Locke's report on Municipal Fiscal Sustainability, released on Tuesday by the commissioners of the report, Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador. The full report is available on MNL's website.

By way of nibbling into the Fascinating, take this, a mathematical riff off one of Locke's supporting tables. In the original table, Locke lists a large cross-section of municipalities (though not quite all) according to the population of the municipality, and by how much the residents collectively paid in provincial income taxes in 2006 (the most recent census year.)

To this data, yours truly has added the unincorporated community of Churchill Falls, plus other localities in Labrador not included in Locke's original sample. His (and my's) source data is available at Community Accounts. The communities are then sorted in descending order by the ratio between the community's share of provincial income tax, and its share of the provincial population.

Out of 236 communities (Locke's 227 sample plus the other Labrador communities added after the fact), there were 27 where the city, town, or community contributed a larger share of provincial income tax, than would be expected if the distribution of provincial income tax was perfectly uniform across the province.

At the very top of the scale — somewhat inexplicably; possible explanations are welcome as comments — is Trinity, Trinity Bay, which contributed 0.16% of PIT with 0.04% of the provincial population. Next up are Wabush and Labrador City, both pulling about double their demographic weight in PIT.

Here's the full list of the 27 "have" municipalities or localities, showing the total dollar amount of provincial income taxes paid in 2006, their share of total PIT paid province-wide, and the ratio of share of PIT paid to share of 2006 provincial population: